I’ve been looking for a replacement for PD vRS for a few weeks now and finally bought myself a nice low mileage FL Octavia vRS CR last week.

 

I broke the golden rule and bought the first car I viewed.  Although I had never driven a CR before I had carried out some research and I hoped this along with my time in the PD would give me some confidence when making an informed decision to buy.

 

Long story short, I could tell instantly the car had been remapped when I drove it. The low end surge was stronger than my old PD was in standard trim, not something I expected at all. Excluding the suspect remap the car was otherwise a nice clear standard example, so I decided to take a punt on it.

 

After further driving it was clear the remap wasn’t doing a very good job. Although the initial surge of the engine was strong, the power would drop off almost as soon as the turbo had finished spooling. This would happen throughout the rev range and was further accentuated in the bigger gears. Under sustained full throttle the engine would actually stop reving, it felt like a soft cut limiter, quite odd. I assumed the car was either over boosting or the remap was not agreeing with the DPF?

 

I am convinced many drivers may have felt the extra low end torque and initial extra go and seen this remap as a good thing. However, for me it was clear this engine had been poorly tuned and now offered a very narrow power window, something that could easily go unnoticed to a serial short shifter.

 

I got in touch with Ben at Shark Performance and asked him if he could take a look and possibly flash the ECU with one of Sharks own maps. I know the time and effort Shark have put into developing their software, having ran many incarnations and stages of their software on my previous car. I had first hand experience of the evolution of their software, from the days of overcoming the PD stutter (My P-Torque map) right up to the DPF removal and corresponding software – Where I ended up.

 

When I arrived I managed to twist Ben’s arm into sticking it on the rollers. He removed a stricken BMW in the dyno room, which I duly offered to help push so my car could be run up and assessed. I’m really pleased Ben went for this, the results from the dyno don’t lie, unfortunately for Rapid Remap’s sake.

 

I want to add that, I am not one for pointing fingers or casting dispersions, there is every possibility that this company are blissfully unaware of the results of their tuning and quite possibly believe they are offering a good service.

 

You can see from the dyno graph below the engine performed very badly, it would spool, overboost, stall and respool 3 or 4 times throughout the rev range when ran in 4^th on the rollers.

 

Ben offered to load a standard map run that and then load the Shark Performance map as a comparison. All he had to do first was remove the ECU and take a back up, just in case.

 

Note: My car had a set of temporary wheels fitted when it was on the rollers which were heavily out of balance. The wheel shake can be seen on the dyno plot at higher revs.

 

The differing results were an eye opener. Although not on the graph, it was clear to see the standard map is very smooth and progressive, as you would expect from VAG, they will have spent millions developing the engine.

 

The Rapid Remap clearly shows what can happen if you buy an editing tool/software increase all the values by 10 or 15 % without any basic understanding of engine tuning, fuel injection, forced induction and ECU behaviour.

 

Ben was kind enough to show me the maps in their most basic form, the rapid remap had values altered outside the ranges of the map. I’m not technical so I can’t and don’t want to comment too much on what was wrong, maybe someone from Shark could expand on that?..

 

Moving on; to me the Shark map looks very good and drives even better. On the road the car has definite performance advantage, the engine feels very strong and pulls all the way to the red line. What impresses me most about this car is the way the power is delivered and the car drives. The engine pulls very strong and power builds and builds. There are no surges of power coming in and out, the power doesn’t tail off either. You would be hard pushed to know this engine has been tweaked if you hadn’t previously driven a standard variant.

 

It’s clear to me there has been plenty of development gone into this map and it certainly warrants the extra one or two hundred quid. After owning many remapped VAG cars from Superchips, P-Torque, Revo, Rapid Remap and Shark Performance I can confidently say this is by far the best remapped diesel I have ever driven.

 

The moral of my story? The price you pay for tuning in most cases has a direct coloration to the product you end up with. I have no worries whatsoever in recommending Shark Performance when it comes to VAG tuning, it’s worth every penny.   

CR170_SHARK_VS_RAPID_LEAKE.pdf

So is it a Rapid or an Octavia then?

 

Your experience echoes mine with Shark. Ive had lots of mapped cars, three revo maps on the VAG stuff as well as Superchips, two JabbaSport's, Celtic Tuning etc and nothing compares to the outright quality of the Shark software. Enjoy the car and its new found performance!  

Been to a few places over the years....and at the moment I am very happy with the way Shark works  :sun: 

Haha, it's definitely an Octavia, there was nothing rapid about it before.. I was horrified when I saw the first rolling road run.

I'm enjoying the car more right away. :-)

In the interests of professionality I won't be specifically commenting on the old remap, apart from saying that the results speak for themselves and the dyno plot is there for all to see.

 

Thanks for bringing the car to us George!

Glad I wasn't the only one looking to see what maps Shark were doing on the Rapid...

Glad I wasn't the only one looking to see what maps Shark were doing on the Rapid...

I can see how the title could be misleading.

Glad I wasn't the only one looking to see what maps Shark were doing on the Rapid...

We haven't had many enquiries yet (probably owing to the Rapid not being on our website yet) but the 1.6TDI and 1.2TSI remaps are no problem so far.